Coming from Spiegel & Grau on August 6, 2024
“Reading this book is like finding a friend. With intelligence and humor, Lola Milholland invites us to join her in a timely (and delicious!) interrogation of the ethics of food, housing, family, land, and self. As an affirmation and celebration of our deep and radical connections with the world and each other, her book gives me hope.”
—Ruth Ozeki, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Form and Emptiness
A spirited and timely exploration of group living that encourages readers to reconsider the meaning of family and home.
Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open the doors of their rambling home in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates—an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation.
Group Living and Other Recipes tells the story of the residents of the Holman House—of transcendent meals and ecstatic parties, of colorful characters coming together in moments of deep tenderness and inevitable irritation, of a shared life that is appealing, humorous, confounding, and, just maybe, utopian—with a wider exploration of group living as a way of life. From spending time at her aunt and uncle’s intentional community in Washington State to finding her footing in the kitchen as a student in Japan to mushroom hunting in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, Milholland offers an expansive and vibrant reevaluation of the structures at the very center of our lives.
Thoughtful, quirky, candid, and wise, Group Living and Other Recipes introduces a gifted memoirist and thinker, making a convincing case that “now is always the right time to reimagine home and family.”
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More Praise
“This is an intimate and captivating interrogation of home as told from the communal kitchens of Lola Milholland’s most uncommon upbringing. Each episode and every recipe is a delicious study in grace with an immense love for the messy everything of life.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders
“Part memoir, part cookbook, and all heart, Group Living and Other Recipes is a feast for the mind, body, and soul. Readers will love how Lola Milholland deftly explores the intersection of food and life through savory recipes, the compelling stories behind them, and her fascinating path to creating community. It is a book that you will devour whole.”—Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game
“Surprising, enlivening, and nourishing, Lola Milholland’s debut offers an engaging look at communal life up close. In doing so, it helped me to recognize the ways in which my own life is made possible by the work of so many others. (Plus Lola’s recipes are fantastic.) By this I mean that Group Living and Other Recipes helped me to care for the people I hold dear—what a tremendous gift!”—Elizabeth Rush, author of The Quickening and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Rising
“In this boisterous and original book, populated by lovable characters, Lola Milholland blends memoir, food writing, and revealing discussions of everything from housing equity to Filipino American identity to activism around denuclearization. The recipes are just as free-ranging and wonderful. A compelling, eye-opening read.” —Anya von Bremzen, James Beard Award winner and author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking